


Under the fireworks

by Lilly_White



Category: Compilation of FFVII
Genre: Angst, Degradation, Grief, M/M, i edited it a bit but this was written in 2014 so more lyrical/angsty than usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 05:33:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10529946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilly_White/pseuds/Lilly_White
Summary: Mind foggy with his degradation, Genesis reminisces about his relationship with Angeal and how it all went wrong.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Like I said in the tags, I found this fic in my old WIP folder completely out of the blue and decided it was interesting enough to post, so please excuse the difference of style :)

*

Hooded and anonymous, I slide through the crowd. The lanterns and fireworks soak the air with red and the press of bodies all around me feels like I’m wading my way through a slaughterhouse. I don’t want to concern myself with them, I don’t want it – don’t want to see their happy faces and cheeks cracked open, spilling rotten laughter. I dig my chin in, eyes flaring as I cleave through them. Years spent in the mud fighting for these smiles to be dug into their faces, and yet now I can’t bear to look at them. I can’t bear to care for the careless – not any more.

There is black hair, sweeping from the temples of some well-to-do gentleman, and for a bewildering moment it’s you, standing all swathed in expensive threads. I stop in my tracks in the middle of the fair, staring, waiting until the impression leaves me. But it clings, it clings, and in the midst of the revolving music and lights and laughter I’m suffocating, frowning and blinking as if refreshing the image enough times might wipe away the resemblance, like windscreen wipers squeaking across the shattered glass of reality. _Go away,_ I want to tell you. I grit my teeth before the words burst from me, _leave me, leave me, LEAVE._

I have a knife in my pocket and the blunt back of the blade is digging into my fingers as I hold onto it. The leather spine of Loveless is too soft to grasp for comfort sometimes, and right now I need the pain, I need the cold and unforgiving metal. Whenever I see you – or rather, whenever my body turns to ice because of nothing, because there won’t ever be anything any more – I need it against my skin, since it can no longer be your flesh, your bones digging into my own. I hold onto the blade so hard it leaves red grooves in my palm. Once it’s deep enough, the gentleman becomes himself again and I can go on. Keep on moving.

My heels knock against tarmac, legs moving mechanically though I don’t know where I’m going. I’m moving, yellowing eyes and silver-white hair hidden so that no one might stop me to ask, _how did you get that? Are you hurt? Where are you going?_

Their pretense of selflessness has always been laughable. I wouldn’t even know what to say in the unlikely event that I would want to answer. All I know is that I’m going away. Away from where you died.

We came here before, you and I. You brought me here for the festival to get me away from the city, saying it would do me some good. I’d told you I’d had enough of the countryside for a lifetime. You said it was the other way around, that it was the city that was killing me, this time. I scoffed. _Everything’s killing me, then._ Sometimes I hated how you moved everything around for me – your plans, your feelings, your life. You always believed you knew what was right, didn’t you?  
I had smuggled wine along on our trip, and I’ll always remember how livid you were when you found out. You actually smashed the bottles right across the hotel room floor. And the best part was when you refused that I pay the bill, you perfect self-sacrificing bastard. You told them we’d had a “bit of an accident” when they sent people up to check on us, both of us haggard and bleeding, and me so ashamed of showing my face that I couldn’t even protest. Though I did learn a bit about being sobre in the week we spent here, I never really forgave you for that. They were great vintages. And you were always so efficient at showing how much better you were than me, in every possible way.

You told me afterwards, when you’d cured the cuts in our fingers and led me out to see the fireworks, that it was a wedding ritual in certain cultures; putting wine glasses on the floor, covering them in a towel, and crushing them underfoot. I only smirked and said that if you’d been trying to make some kind of proposal then you could’ve been less of an arse about it. Not to mention, you went one step further than empty glasses, didn’t you? I’m not sure if bleeding feet are a part of the ritual. But you made up your own rules – you held me up against the wall with both our hands covered in the glitter of broken glass, telling me I didn’t need that shit, that I was wrong to think I couldn’t function without it. But I can’t, don’t you understand? I have wine instead of blood, depositing a dry layer of tannin on the walls of my heart as it surges through. And you’ve tasted it, you know I’ve always been bitter, my darling, bitter and melancholic and far too boring to hold onto someone like you.  

 _Forget about your parents, Genesis,_ you said as you tightened your arm around my shoulders, our faces aglow under the bouquets of multicoloured gunpowder bursting into existence, far up above us in the night sky.   _Forget about them, about him, about all of it._

I do wonder sometimes, what I would’ve grown into if I had listened to my parents. Maybe I should’ve pursued the path they’d set for me. What good has it done me, to cast aside reason in pursuit of an unattainable dream? But I couldn’t tell you that. I’ve always smiled and reassured you, that I’ve integrated, that I’ve socialized. That I’ve made friends, I’m ok, I’m ok, _I’m ok, now. I don’t regret any of the decisions I made._  

So I told you, though there was that familiar taste of blood in my mouth and the image of my mother closing the front door on me for the last time; _I forgot about ‘them’_ _when we came to Midgar. You know that._  

And as for ‘him’… I could only bow my head.

 _I’m sorry, Angeal, I’m –_  

But you gritted your teeth and kissed me instead, because you’re like that (you were, you _were_ like that). Forgiving. Far too good. What the fuck did you tolerate me for? What could I ever bring you that even came close to what you brought me?

We walked aimlessly across the violet paving stones of Kalm once it was over, hand in hand, and I pretended that you hadn’t seen my cheeks glowing with the euphoria another man had given me; I pretended that you hadn’t been filled with the urge to kill me that afternoon in our Midgarian apartment, cracking your knuckles and turning your back on me while I finished buttoning up. There were still silver hairs lingering on the bed, between my fingers, twined around my belt buckle, and when I tried to rip them out with shaking hands and an even shakier plea for forgiveness you slammed the door behind you. But you know what the worst part was? You weren’t even jealous. You knew that I was sabotaging myself. You hated the self-destructiveness of it far more than you hated the adultery in itself.

Do you know how fucking hard it is, Angeal, to have _existed_ beside someone like you? To accept that there are people who manage to be so inherently _good,_ and that I never deserved a single ounce of what you gave me? I’m worthless, Angeal, completely and utterly worthless and perhaps that was what hurt the most – that I didn’t deserve your goodness, and you didn’t deserve half the shit I put you through. I was never able to adhere to a code like you did, mould myself to a solid set of rules. No, I – I scattered to the winds, disintegrated, like a shredded letter remaining unread.

There are couples, dancing to the improvised music of wandering musicians, or simply holding one another on the sidelines. I’m watching them. We never really worked, did we? Even at the end, when everything should’ve united us, we stood in adversity. I would’ve wanted us to burn down the world, but you were always the same, accepting your fate, preferring to sacrifice yourself than anyone else. But suicide isn’t sacrifice, darling, it’s just plain fucking stupid – didn’t anyone ever teach you that?

Did I drive you to it? Did I? Was it my fault? I was too violent, wasn’t I, too unpredictable, I wore you down even if you always denied it. I wore you down till there was nothing left of you but that rugged, threadbare smile and those eyes glittering with the rust of acceptance, telling me it was alright, it was all going to be alright. Did you forget everything you told me, that time my hands were pressing on the blunt side of the knife and yours were cupping my face, telling me to calm down, _calm down or I’ll have to tie you down and we both know how that’s going to end –_ how is it that you can decide whether or not I’m allowed to die, but I couldn’t decide your fate? I couldn’t decide whether I got to hold onto you just a little longer? Those calloused palms – they were my stability, Angeal, the weathered rock against which I could press my naked skin and remind myself that at least _something_ out there was real, concrete, durable. Except it wasn’t. You weren’t. _Fooled you,_ you might as well have said, _I had you going there, didn’t I!_

Oh but you know I’m a slow learner, darling, and what scares me is that I’m beginning to believe that if I couldn’t count on you, then I can’t count on anyone. 

There’s a couple in a dim alleyway, a little way ahead from the dancing crowd, and they sneer at me as I go past – the girl’s hair is disheveled, pouring over her shoulders, and the man is so beautiful it’s almost painful to look at him. And they are stuck together from the hips upwards, their body language screaming possession, and I can’t tell you how strongly I want to rip them apart – they have no right to exhibit their happiness, no right whatsoever when I am an empty husk looking with nothing but air crossing the rim of my chapped, starved mouth.

There is still blood on my fingers from earlier but they can’t see it in the red lights, and I try to think of what you’d say – but you can’t say anything, so what difference does it make? I don’t even believe in ghosts anymore, you know, I wanted to in the beginning but things are so fucked up now that it’s better to think that you haven’t been able to see any of it.

The boy is the first to go down and I know the satisfaction will only last a couple of minutes, but I live off of those minutes now, those rare seconds of relief. I know what you would say, darling, that I’m insane, that I’ve lost my mind. But it’s your fault if you aren’t here to prevent it. I lost you first and I’m sure you know that starting from that point, my mind could never have lasted very long.

“Please,” the girl is whimpering as the knife bites into her skin, “please sir,  I don’t wanna die – _please – ”_

“Shouldn’t have smiled like that then, should you?” I snarl back at her, and I can almost taste that cherry lip gloss mingling with the salt of her tears.

“I’m sorry,” she gabbles, “Sorry I smiled, please – _I’m so sorry I smiled.”_

_*_


End file.
